questions and (hopefully) answers

viewpoint thinks there should be more to the presidential campaign than "gaffes, scandals, missteps and debate zingers... to delight the talking heads and newspaper columnists".

The only thing we have to fear is fearmongering!

these facts should give some perspective which the recent barrage of US economy gloom-and-doom stories lack:

Zimbabwe's inflation rate is over 66,000 percent, and it has been worse in Germany in 1923 and Yugoslavia in the winter of 1993.

Unemployment is still relativelyand historically low.

(this post inspired by dustbury)

update: no oil for pacifists reports additional details.

a cornball joke

that's not too funny.

abuse

house of eratosthenes tells a sad story of abuse. it begins:

If a man loved his wife the way democrats love America, how would he treat her?

Well, he wouldn’t act very manly at all, the way he’d keep bringing up things she did in the past, completely out of context. That’s a stereotype applied to small-minded, intemperate girlfriends and wives, isn’t it? Bringing up a bunch of things out of nowhere that you did ten years ago? So I guess he’d go to work, hang around the water cooler, babble away during the lunch hour — never getting far away from the subject of what a moral reprobate his wife is. You talk about sports, he’ll find a way to change the subject to a check his wife bounced a few years ago. You talk about religion, he’ll talk about his wife’s unpaid parking tickets. You talk about politics, he’ll talk about her old boyfriends — not humorously, but ominously, about the lack of character she must still have today, for ever interlocking with someone like that.

Always always always: Coming to unflattering conclusions about her, will be the point. The evidence will be cherry-picked to support this. He won’t even pretend to be analyzing it even-handedly. He’ll just be there to talk some smack.

Loving husband?

read the rest.

obama's new rules

update: a related cartoon

local malcontent carries barack's tablets to the rest of us mortals. here's an edited list; follow the link to read the details:

DO NOT talk about my race.

DO NOT complain that I am permitted to talk about racism, while you are being prohibited from doing so.

DO NOT bring up my own multi-racial ancestry.

REFER ALWAYS to my speech on race as the final word on the subject.

DO NOT mention my spiritual mentor.

DO NOT talk about my middle name, Hussein.

DO NOT talk about my wife's own words concerning her feelings of shame in our country.

DO NOT bring up my light-weight legislative experience.

DO NOT investigate my Chicago-brand election to either post, either.

DO NOT bring up Tony Rezko, my best fund-raiser, friend, and current defendant in a money-laundering scheme trial.

DO NOT ever bring up my total lack of military experience.

IGNORE the fact that my candidacy for President is based entirely upon empty words.

IGNORE that I, Barack Obama, am listed as the most liberal and most Communistic-rated Senator in the past 70 years.

IF YOU do not follow all of these rules, you are a racist.

VOTE for me unquestioningly, or I and my Islamic friends will target you as a racist.

veep?

fred barnes ponders a question that many (including mcgehee, snugg harbor, and the local malcontent) are asking: who should mccain choose to be his vice presidential running mate? i have even less of an idea than fred does, unfortunately. and even if i did, he or she would likely be disqualified by the increasingly spineless republican party for being too qualified for the actual job.

short answer: i see no political solution to our problems.

---

update: wizbang has some relevant (yet seemingly contradictory) quotes:

"The days of unquestioning loyalty are gone... It's time for principled leadership."

"...the anti-McCain sentiments [threaten] to have some Republicans stay home in November even though they know what will be the result of that action. Gather your senses Republicans, a Democrat in the White House with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate is going to be a nightmare you'll be regretting not too far down the road."

fruit

The Anglican Archbishop endorses Islam.

The Vatican invents some new sins.

The Southern Baptist Convention lets the nose of the green camel in the tent.

but who am i to judge?

update 1: also beware of the peaceniks.

update 2: ...and obama's pastor.

update 3: Monday Evening reports a sadly typical incident of Islamofascism, while the Arab League remains as fruity as ever.

now i'm even more frightened

one blog had summarized the obama-vs-clinton contest as "when liberal guilt meets identity politics". and in that context, i agree with geraldine ferraro (gasp!):

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up."

"Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

no matter the intentions, racism is bad whichever way it points.

via csm

---

update 3: this incident gets a good scrapplefacing :)

update 2: looks like david mamet is coming to his senses as well.

update 1: in related news, i also agree with this former clinton apologist (emphases, italics, and links mine)

She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals -- whether it was Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Cattle Futures, Web Hubbell, or Norman Hsu. She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband's serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of "Clinton apologists" -- who believed that peace and prosperity were more important than regrettable personality traits.

And then she ran for president.

After seven years of George W. Bush, America is hungry for change. Big change. (okay, i disagree with that phrase) And let's face it -- Hillary Clinton, the party standard-bearer and former White House denizen -- isn't it. But even after voters coalesced around Barack Obama, handing him eleven straight primaries (twelve, if you count Vermont), she refused to accept the possibility -though math, money and momentum were clearly against her -- that the Bush/Clinton Family Band might not be #1 on America's Billboard chart anymore.

So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative -- personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama's message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. She cried "shame on you, Barack Obama" for his campaign tactics, while (if we're to believe Matt Drudge) simultaneously floating a picture of him in Somali garb to stir up questions of his patriotism.

She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians. She demanded that he "reject" the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, but remained silent when Rush Limbaugh stirred up votes for her in Texas. And she crafted the now-infamous "3am" attack ad -- which used scare tactics to highlight Senator Obama's perceived lack of experience in foreign affairs. Straight out of the ol' Atwater/Rove playbook. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to her husband's patronizing, racially insensitive comments earlier in the primary season.

Was this the same Hillary Clinton whose husband ran on the idea that hope was more powerful than fear? The wife of a president who had less foreign policy experience than Barack Obama when he was elected? And exactly which crisis is she referring to when she claims to have more experience? And while we're at it, where the h*** are those tax returns?

It's clear that Hillary's back in this thing, at least for the time being. But at what cost? Short of some cataclysmic event, there's no way either she or Mr. Obama can reach 2,025 delegates in the remaining contests. That means she's accepted the inevitability of a brokered convention. A convention she'll almost certainly enter with fewer delegates than her opponent. That raises some important questions:

Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol' fashioned "knife fight?" (probably all of the above)

And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?

However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she'll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama's experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she'll have become Mr. McCain's second running mate.

She's proven that she cares more about "Hillary" than "unity." More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She's become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits -- as long as she takes everyone else with her.

On Friday, one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton "a monster" during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me (and most sensible people) -- who've watched Hillary's descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.

Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected? (they always have. why would they change now?)

I don't know.

All I know is...I'm through apologizing.

on spitzer

scrappleface takes the high road

update: tehran's police chief follows spitzer

they only bring out the good china for visitors

also from csm, a foreign policy pop quiz:

What did the State Department do as a result of (China's history of human rights abuses)? If you guessed "It removed China from its list of the world's worst human rights violators," you're right! Congratulations! You've won a trip to the gulag of your choice!

Sure, the top ten offenders could give China a run for its money. After all (those countries) have nothing much to be proud of in the human rights arena. But with a population of 1.3 billion, China can trounce on more human rights in an afternoon than its competitors can falsely imprison, torture or just plain murder in a month of Sundays.

---

Before we go, let's do a little exercise in civics with the top ten (human rights violating countries):

• North Korea, Communist dictatorship
• Myanmar, Communist junta
• Iran, Islamist theocracy
• Syria, Islamist dictatorship
• Zimbabwe, Socialist dictatorship
• Cuba, Communist dictatorship
• Belarus, Soviet anachronism, Communist style
• Uzbekistan, Soviet anachronism, Islamist style
• Eritrea, Islamist dictatorship
• Sudan, Islamist theocratic dictatorship

Gee, not a democratic nation, Judeo-Christian or otherwise, among them. What have we learned, class?

first ingsoc, now nc-soc

the flannel avenger warns of big brother's intrusion into north carolina: on the roads and down the wells. and liberty dad has some generally related links.

"When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim."

Mark Steyn on the Democratic primaries:

The Democratic primary season seems to have dwindled down into a psycho remake of Driving Miss Daisy. The fading matriarch Mizz Hill’ry doesn’t want to give up the keys to the Democratic-party vehicle but the dignified black chauffeur Hokey insists it’ll be a much smoother ride with him in the driver’s seat, full of gear change you can believe in, etc. Yet, just as he thinks the old biddy’s resigned to a nomination as Best Supporting Actress, the backseat driver plunges her hat pin into his spine, wrests the wheel away and lurches across the median.

Read the rest

i'm actually somewhat frightened

dustbury has a semi-regular feature of "strange search engine queries", but this blog may have just gotten one of the strangest ones ever:

#1 of 243 on google for "Quaker Oats made past the Crab nebula, near the Planet Q".

update: looks like this post has reinforced that #1 position. if you found this post via those search terms, could you please leave a comment clarifying what this search is for? (i'm hoping it's song lyrics...)

continuation

I agree with the first part of Echo Zoe's statement against political compromise, and I respect his conclusion. Tying in to my previous post, here are the key parts I agree with - emphases mine:

...realizing that voting Democrat because my parents did was a bit silly, and I needed to figure things out for myself. However, I still hadn’t softened to the Republicans. In 1998, I voted to elect Jesse Ventura Governor of Minnesota. My second mistake, but heading in the right direction.

Six months later, in May of 1999, at the age of 21, I came face to face with my Savior. It was a radical change in my life, and I would never be the same. I immediately took interest in all things related to Christianity. Among the first things I ever prayed was that the Lord would show me His view of the world, and where mine was wrong. I chalk it up to answered prayer, but I immediately became very Conservative. I understood at once that no matter how I tried to justify it, abortion is murder. I realized that there was a reason why socialism is a relatively new phenomenon in America, which it hasn’t always been - that the redistribution of wealth is nothing more than legalized theft - “Plunder” as Bastiat called it. I had a year and a half to go before the next election, and I was firmly on the Right.

So you’d think I’d be a Republican now, right? Wrong. In late 1999 and into 2000, I could see that most of the candidates seeking the Republican Presidential Nomination were watered-down Democrats. John McCain was getting great praise from the media, and W. was preaching “Compassionate Conservatism”, which struck me as neither compassionate nor Conservative...

Between 2000 and 2004, and also the 2002 and 2006 mid-term elections, I received a lot heat from my friends on the Right for not jumping in line with the Republican Party. When I argued that they hadn’t done anything to convince me that they deserve my vote, or that they are even Conservative, I got all the usual platitudes about them being better than the alternative. I didn’t believe there to be only one alternative...

I have sat back this season and watched as so many Conservatives lamented the poor selection this time around. The mainstream media had decided early on that McCain, Romney, Giuliani, and Huckabee were the “viable” candidates. The punditry lamented that Fred Thompson wasn’t running, and quickly abandoned him when he did enter the race. After 7 years of unprecedented spending increases under G.W. Bush and the Republican Legislature, a war that has been promised to last decades, no dent in the abortion holocaust, and the curtailing of person freedom in the name of a “War on Terror”, one would have hoped that the Right would be eager to rally around a true Conservative. However, they quickly decided that Conservatives were “unelectable,” and resolved to have a Liberal candidate be the nominee.

leaders? leaders? we don' need no steenkin leaders!

dustbury shows us a view from the porch:

Folks, we have a serious perception problem in this country. A bunch of people seem to think we have "leaders" instead of "representatives". Bosses and not employees.

Folks, we hired them. We pay them. They work for you, not the other way around. If you are sitting around and waiting for leadership from this collection of do-gooders, used car salesmen, and former Student Body Treasurers, you might as well wait for Santa while you're at it.

These are the people we hire to schlep out our legislative trash in Washington, DC because we're too busy being, you know, productive to handle scutwork like that. We've given them a metaphorical Roto-Rooter and asked them to keep the navigable waterways clear; handed them a calculator and asked them to keep an eye on the national checking account. And, like a sixteen year-old left home with a simple list of chores who instead gets into the liquor cabinet and invites her friends over for a party, look what's happened to them.

Folks, if you want "Political Leaders" you're living in the wrong country; the closest provision we have for a "Political Leader" in the Constitution is the guy we hire to mind the Army & Navy and shake hands with foreigners for us. This is the country where we're supposed to be leading ourselves, not waiting for solutions to be handed down from on high. Your representatives are supposed to be representing you, hence the name. They are not the legislative equivalent of grenades, where you pull the electoral pin, lob them towards Washington, and hope they go off the way you expected. They're your employees; you need to tell them what to do and keep an eye on them, or they'll be stealing the petty cash and spending their whole shift leaning on a broom handle and slacking off.

Don't wait to be led.

options

this history lesson posted at mostly cajun is being noted around the blogododecahedron, and rightly so. here's the core of it (edited):

We find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.

The Jihadis... believe that Wahhabi Islam should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. All who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra and their goal. There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet known which side will win, - the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and (eventually) the US, European, and Asian economies. The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the educated, more rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

...

The Cold War lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; 42 years!

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany!

World War II began (with the Japanese invasion of China) in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten-year occupation, and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The U.S. has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The U.S. took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In WWII the U.S. averaged 2,000 KIA a week - for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far. The stakes are at least as high... a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

...

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilizations should be like, and the most determined always win... The pacifists always lose, because the anti-peace militants kill them.

...

WWII cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year’s GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WWII cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

This is not a TV show or a two-hour movie in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally (like England in WWII) in the Middle East, a platform from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world. The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless somebody prevents them from getting them.

We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).
3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.
4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, you are effectively condemning our children and grandchildren to live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.